IDEAS & TRENDS: OUT THERE; The Space Telescope: A Sign of Intelligent Life

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IF the human species became extinct tomorrow -wiped out, sad thought, by a lethal virus or a nuclear war or the unwelcome arrival of a giant comet from the Oort Cloud - and extraterrestrials who came to investigate the disaster began by examining Earth's satellites to learn about the creatures who once ruled the blue planet below, what would they find?

Most of the thousands of satellites, they could infer, had served a practical purpose: some charted the weather, others relayed television signals and telephone communications, others searched for oil, aided in navigation or kept an eye on foreign armies. All these satellites look down at the Earth. But the Hubble Space Telescope, launched into orbit last week, is different. It looks outward, into the depths of the universe, its sensors poised to sample ancient light from galaxies far away. It has no practical purpose at all. As the physicist Robert Wilson said 20 years ago, when asked during a Congressional hearing whether the Fermilab particle accelerator in Illinois would contribute to national security, ''It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.''

Like Fermilab, the Hubble Space Telescope is a monument neither to commerce, like the World Trade Center, nor to the fear of death, like the pyramid at Cheops, nor to vanity, like the bust of Ozymandias. It is an expression of pure human curiosity.

And, like Fermilab, Hubble is expensive: $1.55 billion to build the mighty telescope, plus an estimated $200 million annually to operate it during its projected 15 years in orbit. A big price tag implies high expectations, and the claims being raised for Hubble are bold. The standard promise, intoned for the television cameras by project scientists, engineers and astronauts, is that Hubble will bring about the greatest revolution in astronomy since Galileo first trained a telescope on the stars, in the summer of 1609.

That's quite a claim. Galileo's observations led to the downfall of the Earth-centered cosmology that had dominated Western thought for 2,000 years, throwing open the door to the realization that we live in a universe of great size and antiquity. It's not surprising that the recent spate of what is being called ''Hubble hype'' has sparked skepticism over whether the orbiting telescope can live up to its billing, and has added fuel to an already heated debate over the wisdom of spending gigabucks on big science.

Some of the concern has to do with the purely technical question of whether Hubble's performance will match its buildup. In the 70 years since mule teams struggled up the dirt roads of Mount Wilson with parts to build the 60-inch telescope Edwin Hubble used to discover the expansion of the universe, astronomers have found that a lot can go wrong with the steel-and-glass giants they employ to study the stars. Telescope mirrors can warp with changes in temperature, guidance systems fail, computers crash and electronic detectors self-destruct.

Only last February, a team of highly capable American astronomers - misled, they said, by a malfunctioning video camera attached to the 150-inch telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile - were obliged, to their acute embarrassment, to withdraw a paper written a year earlier in which they claimed to have detected pulses of light coming from a spinning celestial cinder left behind by supernova 1987A. And that mishap occurred on Earth, in an observatory dome, where technicians can get out their soldering irons and go to work on a balky part at any hour of the day or night. What level of reliability can realistically be expected of Hubble, a thoroughly unique and innovative telescope the size of a city bus, now that it has been set free 380 miles up in space, where it can be serviced only by an occasional, and expensive, visit from a space shuttle crew?

The most honest answer is that nobody really knows. Like other missions hammered out by a space agency notorious for tacking an unsteady course with one eye on the stars and the other on the budget, Hubble is a mass of compromises. Its size was reduced to make it fit in the space shuttle's cargo bay, its orbit is lower than many astronomers would prefer (because the shuttle can fly it no higher), and the amount of power produced by its recalcitrant solar panels is barely sufficient to keep it running.

''Despite the expected rewards, the story of the Hubble Space Telescope is also the story of what's wrong with how NASA conducts space science,'' writes Robert Bless, in the winter issue of Issues in Science and Technology. Dr. Bless is the astronomer in charge of developing the telescope's high-speed photometer, an $11 million device the size of a phone booth that can measure variations in the brightness of a star 10 million times a second.

But whatever the future may hold, the Hubble boosters cannot be faulted for any lack of personal commitment; seldom have so many scientists gambled so much of their time for so chancy a payoff. Lyman Spitzer was a 33-year-old astronomer at Yale when he originally proposed putting a large telescope in orbit, where it could carry out observations free from the interference and distortion of the Earth's atmosphere. By the time he got to see Hubble carried aloft, having lobbied on behalf of the project for more than 40 years, he was a 75-year-old professor emeritus from Princeton.

Another gray-haired Hubble scientist, asked during a press briefing at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center what he would do when Hubble ended its projected run sometime in the years 2005 to 2020, said ruefully, ''That's not an interesting question for me.'' The Hubble program scientist, Edward J. Weiler, who calls himself ''a newcomer - only 10 years on the project,'' says he worries about what he terms the problem of ''infant mortality in spacecraft - you send something up and it either dies right away or it lasts 10 years.'' In short, the Hubble project is no cavalier toss of the dice to the hundreds of men and women who have worked to make it succeed; no one has more to lose than they do if it fails.

Concerns about the big science issue go beyond Hubble, of course, and are deepening as the bills mount up. The price tag for the superconducting supercollider, a 54-mile ring in Texas that could enable physicists to replicate conditions found in the Big Bang a millisecond after the beginning of time, already has climbed from an estimated $4.5 billion to $8 billion, and not a spadeful of soil has yet been turned on its behalf. The Human Genome Project, which will map every gene in the human DNA molecule, is expected to cost $3 billion. And the future is likely to see more of the same. As Leon Lederman, director emeritus of Fermilab, noted in The New York Times Book Review a few weeks ago: ''The image of the scientist as lonely scholar in his laboratory is fading fast. Inevitably, as the mysteries of nature become ever more subtle, more complex apparatus are needed to penetrate them, and big science is the order of the day.''

Critics of such big-ticket projects fear not so much that they will detract from pressing social needs -nobody familiar with the realities of Federal spending really expects that money saved by cancelling a particle accelerator will be spent to aid the homeless or to revive the school lunch program - but that they will siphon needed funds away from more modest but more productive scientific endeavors.

Consider, for instance, the Keck Telescope, now nearing completion in Hawaii. With its 32-foot mirror, Keck promises to be the world's most powerful ground-based telescope. Like Hubble, it ought to be able to scrutinize galaxies billions of light years from Earth, yielding clues to how the universe evolved. It can't do everything Hubble can do, but it can do some things better. Its cost? $100 million - about what it will take just to operate Hubble for six months. Even if Hubble lives up to expectations, the critics ask, is it really likely to do more for science than building two Keck telescopes a year for the next 15 years?

Here again, the honest answer is that we just don't know. Hubble is an instrument of discovery; its paternity lies as close to the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria as to Pasteur's test tubes or Einstein's notebooks; and it is intrinsic to discovery that one cannot accurately predict what will be discovered.

The Hubble scientists know what they would like to do, at first - they want, for instance, to see if a giant black hole lurks at the core of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, to watch cyclones form on Jupiter and to see if nearby stars have planets. But beyond that they have little idea what to expect - any more than Galileo, had he been interviewed in Padua at sunset on his first night as an observational astronomer, could have predicted that he would find craters on the moon, see moons circling Jupiter, or find, in the phases of Venus, hard evidence that the planets orbit the sun and not the other way round.

The launching of the Hubble Space Telescope lofts human thought into the realm of the unexplored. ''We can't be sure what we'll discover when we go out there,'' says Peter Stockman, deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which will gather and analyze the data Hubble beams back to Earth. ''We often frame our understanding of what the space telescope will do in terms of what we expect to find, and actually it would be terribly anticlimactic if in fact we found what we expect to find.'' John Bahcall, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., predicts that ''the most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects we have not yet imagined.''

The astronomer James Westphal of the California Institute of Technology grins wickedly when asked what he wants to do with the telescope to which he has dedicated 13 of his most productive years, for he dreams of making discoveries that would shatter some of our most deeply held convictions about the nature of the universe. ''One of our pleasures,'' he said recently, ''is when we ruin a theory or two.''

An Ordeal by Fire

And that, ultimately, is what the Hubble Space Telescope is for. It is a machine for subjecting our conception of the wider universe to an ordeal by fire, for hostaging theories to the verdict of fresh and better observations. The willingness to expose cherished ideas to such tests, indeed the insistence that we do so at every opportunity, is what distinguishes science from theology or philosophy.

And science is what we as human beings do best, at the end of the second millennium. Science is our equivalent of painting in Michelangelo's day, of music in the time of Bach, of seafaring in the age of Prince Henry the Navigator. The Hubble Space Telescope is not just the most complex and expensive unmanned space probe ever launched; it is also a work of art. Like the battered Voyager spacecraft flung out among the stars, the Viking landers sitting sandblasted on the ruddy dunes of Mars, and the paltry, heeled-over flags and scattered laser reflectors left on the moon by the Apollo explorers, it says more about us, and better, than we can know.

Timothy Ferris, the author of ''Coming of Age in the Milky Way,'' teaches science writing and astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is covering the Hubble Space Telescope mission for The New Yorker.

A version of this article appears in print on April 29, 1990, on Page 4004001 of the National edition with the headline: IDEAS & TRENDS: OUT THERE; The Space Telescope: A Sign of Intelligent Life. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe